Togari: Volume 4Review

Togari is based on a fairly common storyline in manga – the redemption of a person through their efforts to rid the world of evil. What's interesting about manga is how they'll often actually give us a number - in this case 108 – of demons, souls, or sins that must be released within a certain time period. I mean, Kame Kaze has 88 Beasts that have to be warded off, Judas I think has 99 souls to collect, and so on. What keeps things interesting for Tobei, the main character of Togari is that he's also got a time limit – 108 days – to get the job done.

Tobei's a hard protagonist to like. This is by design, as he's a damned soul given a shot at redemption by carrying out the aforementioned task – expunging 108 sins in 108 days – but as he is a damned soul, he wasn't really likeable to begin with. Finally with volume four we start to see some of the roots to his ruthlessness, and how he became the way he was, and is. After all, 300 years in Dante's Inferno isn't exactly going to turn anyone into a model citizen, but Tobei is willing to take on the challenge presented before him if it will give him a shot at life again. At this stage, however, we're not sure that he wants to return to the material plane again to change his life for the better, or simply continue to be the jerk he was 300 years ago.

Much of this book follows a fairly standard shonen blueprint – Tobei tracks down sins (embodied as shadowy or demonic presences in normal people) and kills them. You get the occasional nice side story out of this as a result, usually showing just how creepy someone had to become in order for their sin to take such a hold on them. By the time we reach this volume, we're starting to see some redemptive qualities in Tobei, as he becomes a "hero" to one of the children he's saved, and continues to befriend a few people along the way. Given time, there's hope that Tobei will complete his quest and become a better person in the process, but it also seems like that will take much more time than he's allotted.

I was not a huge fan of Yoshinori Natsume's artwork in this series. It's sketchy and rough, which is definitely the type of artwork you'd want to see in this sort of story, but I found many of the facial structures to be way too similar and saw a lot of the same poses. Tobei seems to have only one face most of the time, and there's only so much of that you can really take in a 200-page manga. I'd like to reiterate that while the artwork was not to my personal taste, it was completely appropriate for the type of book Togari is. You may completely love it - and more power to you if you do.